Australia's Antarctic researchers have taken a rare look at the luminous world under the polar sea ice, and brought it home.

A remotely operated underwater vehicle was sent into the frozen depths of the Southern Ocean about 3400 kilometres south-west of Hobart to find vibrant light under the jumbled pack ice. It came back with an abstract artist's palette of blues and greens.

"The ROV's icy dives transported us into a different world," the voyage's science leader, Klaus Meiners, of the Australian Antarctic Division, said in Hobart on Friday.